color as disclosed through a pinhole) of the actual object that is depicted,
and (b) the occlusion shape and the local color presented on the marked
surface. Or as Hyman puts it,“there is a strict and invariable relationship
between the shapes and colors on a picture’s surface and the objects that it
depicts, which can be definedwithoutreferring to the psychological effect the
picture produces in a spectator’s mind.”^45 This theory has the advantage of
emphasizing that painters are working hard to get right somethingabout the
objectdepicted asitappears to us from a point of view. Difficulties for
objective theories arise, however, when we consider exactly how painters
do their work. As Dominic Lopes and Michael Newell have objected against
objective theories, painters will very frequentlynotmatch a local color on a
painted surface to the aperture color of a depicted object.^46 It is normally
impossible for a painted surface to equal in brilliance colors as they are
presented in daylight, and in any case painters are concerned more to match
“relationsbetween the brightnesses, hues, and saturations of their subject
matter[s]”^47 than they are to reproduce those brightnesses, hues, and satur-
ations themselves. They are trying to render how things lookto usunder
certain conditions of lighting (different for paintings in galleries and objects
in nature) and given the operations of our visual systems. Second, even the
presentation of outline or occlusion shape is arguably subject to some cul-
tural variation (within constraints set by our visual systems), so that there are
different ways of getting right how objects look; hence some objects may not
have just one look from a point of view to be captured. According to Newell,
Greco-Roman painters standardly use a pointed ellipse, not the smooth
ellipse that is now typically used, in order to render the round rims of dishes
and vases seen from an oblique angle. The Greco-Roman spectators of these
pictures presumably immediately saw the rims of dishes and vases in the
pointed ellipse marks on surfaces, and with some adjustment we can too.^48
(An objectivist might counter that Newell’s examples are not completely
clear; the “point” of the ellipse occurring just where the front rim is(^45) John Hyman,The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art(University of
Chicago Press, 2006), p. 73; emphasis added.
(^46) Dominic Lopes,“Pictorial Color: Aesthetics and Cognitive Science,”Philosophical Psychology
12 (1999), pp. 415–28; Michael Newell,What is a Picture?, pp. 75–81.
(^47) Newell,What is a Picture?, pp. 75–76.
(^48) Ibid., pp. 86–91.
40 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art